It’s bonus time for Granite Telecommunications employees, regardless of their rank or job title

At many companies, end-of-year bonuses are the province of the top muckety-mucks, the ones with the corner offices and big expense accounts.

Not at Granite Telecommunications in Quincy. COO Rand Currier tells me that the reseller of landline services is distributing nearly $500,000 among its 782 full-time employees and 82 temps. The size of this holiday bonus has nothing to do with the worker’s ranking in the Granite hierarchy, Currier says. Instead, it is based on years of service at Granite. On the low end, temps are getting $50, and new full-time employees are getting $200. On the high end, those who have been there for more than four years will get $1,000.

But the end-of-year bonus doesn’t end there. Currier says the company set a goal back in September for selling a certain number of new phone line accounts, DSL services, alarm services and other accounts by Dec. 31. If the company hit the mark by the end of the year, Granite employees would get a bonus of $1,200 – on top of the holiday bonus. Again, rank doesn’t mean anything. Instead, each worker would get the same-sized bonus.

Currier says the company hit the magic goal last week in time for another sweetener to kick in: all the employees will get the Friday before Christmas off, as well as the following Monday. And, the size of the incentive bonus will continue to grow modestly until the end of the year if the company keeps landing new accounts.

The holiday bonus is being distributed this week, Currier says, while the incentive bonus will go out in January.

CEO Rob Hale has taken Granite a long way out of the ashes of his failed telecom Network Plus, a company that essentially dissolved through bankruptcy proceedings in 2002 during the industry’s bust. Hundreds of people lost their jobs back then, and the experience wasn’t that much fun for the shareholders, either.

Hale avoided the pitfalls that Network Plus encountered by not building out a physical fiber-optic network (and all the debt that would have come with it), and by not going the IPO route to raise money from outside investors.

Hale has built Granite into a company that generates more than $600 million a year in revenue. It’s well on its way to being more successful than Network Plus, by many measures, if it’s not there already. And there are probably more than 800 people working in North Quincy who are quite happy about that trajectory – especially at this time of the year.